Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England by David Koistinen (review)

New England’s textile, shoe, and woolen sectors were some of the first in the country to experience mass waves of relocations, closures, and wholesale community abandonment, thus making these industries in this region a natural place to look for clues about the causes, effects, and reactions to deindustrialization. With Confronting Decline, David Koistinen joins a large and still-growing body of literature on this first wave of deindustrialization, while training his focus away from the economic causes underlying deindustrialization and its subsequent effects on workers, unions, and individual communities. Koistinen instead analyzes the variety of responses to New England’s industrial decline by private- and public- sector actors in an effort to stave off decline and, later, to facilitate regional redevelopment. Rank-and-file workers rarely make an appearance in Koistinen’s narrative; this story “is necessarily a tale of the actions of . . . highly placed individuals” (5), the author notes early on. Confronting Decline nevertheless lends important insight into continuity and change in the development of industrial policy and the search for economic options for workers in the face of widespread industrial removal.

Confronting Decline follows a largely chronological framework in which Koistinen identifies three main responses to deindustrialization in twentieth-century New England: retrenchment, federal assistance, and economic development. As the region experienced the first major wave of industrial closures and relocations to the low-wage and largely unregulated South in the 1920s, manufacturers in declining sectors, especially textiles, pushed forward with a strategy of retrenchment, trying to roll back the legislative gains made by labor and their reform-minded political allies since the late nineteenth century. Focusing largely on Massachusetts’s textiles, Koistinen’s retrenchment analysis treads somewhat familiar ground as he delves into these legislative battles, especially over the state’s maximum- hours laws, which pitted textile manufacturers crying “change the laws or we will close” against organized labor and social reformers. Although on the question of hours protections retrenchment efforts were “completely frustrated” (26), manufacturers salvaged a partial win by successfully lobbying for changes in municipal and state tax codes. Likewise, manufacturers deflected blame for the region’s economic decline and forwarded a narrative of deindustrialization that continues to hold sway over economic policy debates today: “In blaming the statutes for their problems, industrialists by implication pinned responsibility on the unionists, reformers, and politicians who favored keeping the restrictions in place” (45–46).

Through these retrenchment battles, unionists and their political supporters argued that the best response to industrial decline was not to pursue a least-common- denominator approach to workplace standards but to reduce regional competitive pressures by raising the standards of workers nationwide to match those in New England. This message carried into the 1930s, by which time New England textile manufacturers had begun calling on the federal government to legislate production restrictions in order to bring national output into line with consumption. From the National Industrial Recovery Act, to the proposed National Textile Act (a.k.a. the Ellenbogen Bill), to the Fair Labor Standards Act, it was through federal assistance—the second main response strategy analyzed in Confronting Decline—that New England unionists and manufacturers alike sought to equalize norms and even out North-South wage, hour, and production gaps that had been so devastating to New England’s basic industries. Yet while the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) ultimately set a floor on wages and a ceiling on working hours for a broad swath of the American industrial workforce, the more stringent and comprehensive wage setting and output controls that were part of the Ellenbogen Bill and the original version of the FLSA foundered on resistance from manufacturers—including in the New England textile sector, where manufacturers balked at any tinkering with the free market. Some labor movement leaders were concerned that such standards would supplant union-led collective bargaining, shifting the political landscape for the Roosevelt administration. Further, as Koistinen observes, federal...